[CentOS] VMWARE tools on Centos 5.2

[Dag Wieers]

On Sun, 21 Jun 2009, Jeff wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 6:58 AM, Samir RHAOUSSI <samir.rhaoussi at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I m using Centos 5.2 in my virtual machine VMWARE
>> i've got the rpm of VMWARE tools, after double clicking on it, it installs
>> successfully.
>> but after this installation i still can not change my displaay résolution..
>> (the max is 800 * 600)
>> any help?
>
> You must run /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl to complete the installation.

VMwareTools is a kludge. It is sad to see how bad a piece of software can 
be written by a big company like EMC. Here is a list:

  1. You have to run vmware-config-tools.pl from the console (typing in
     commands instead of copy&pasting them)

  2. You cannot automate this process because of the above (even though we
     succeeded to fool vmware-config-tools.pl so it thinks it is run from a
     console, with some success)

  3. vmware-config-tools.pl brings down the network, but it takes no action
     to bring it back up again (that's probably the reason for 1. and 2.
     but it is irritating)

  4. vmare-config-tools.pl modifies modprobe.conf (some versions do it
     wrongly) and if you make changes to your modprobe.conf and then run
     vmware-config-tools.pl it will restore an old version, so you loose
     any changes you have made

  5. There is no easy way to download the latest VMwareTools (with eg.
     updated kernel modules) from the VMware website

  6. You have to extract VMwareTools from an ISO on an ESX (or from an RPM
     containing an ISO containing a tarball with the RPM iirc) because you
     cannot simply download it.

  7. Different versions are not quite compatible, so you have to be careful
     running the correct VMwareTools version for the correct ESX server you
     are running. And VMwareTools does not check or escalate when your
     setup is wrong or unsupported

  8. If you have netdump running, then running vmware-config-tools.pl
     forces you to unload netconsole.ko on the console, which is rather a
     RHEL bug, but it could at least work around it.

  9. On all our systems we have been forced to pre-compile the modules
     because VMwareTools is lacking support for our kernels and we do not
     want to have a compiler and development packages on our servers.

If you have anything else, please add to this list :-)

The solution to some of the above could be to provide a kmod packages that 
includes the correct kernel modules for RHEL4 and RHEL5. But for a lot of 
problems above a rewrite of VMwareTools is needed.

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at centos.org,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]